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(Images: Sean Balch by permission to CHS)
3/15/11 7:16 PM: Seattle Police have shut down streets around East Precinct headquarters at 12th and Pine as a group of about two dozen anti-police protesters are again marching across Capitol Hill.
7:30PM – Anti-police protest prompts East Precinct lockdown – I count about 30 bike patrol officers and a horse mounted contingent. SPD nearly outnumbers protesters.
7:31PM – Anti-police protest prompts East Precinct lockdown – SPD is deploying movable barriers to open and shut streets as the group of protesters moves about the area and onto Broadway.
7:56PM – Anti-police protest prompts East Precinct lockdown – Crowd headed down Pine. 1 big difference is both number and demeanor of cops. More of them. More talking with marchers. I’m peeling off coverage but will head back out if situation changes.
And maybe the cops will get so tired of chasing protesters around the city that they’ll think twice next time before pulling the trigger on some hapless street person. The justice system isn’t much of a deterrent, is it?
….yawn…..
Yeah, “they’ll”. They all did it. They all made the mistake. Apparently one person in a group makes a terrible mistake and it becomes everyone.
One Asian person steals a car = Asians are car thieves
One African-American commits an assault = Black folks are violent
One immigrant shoplifts = Immigrants are thieves
One Bus Driver gets arrested for selling crack = Bus drivers sling crack
One teacher gets arrested for sleeping with a student = teachers are child molesters.
An officer made a mistake, plain and simple. SPD had over 500,000 contacts last year, a terrible mistake was made. It wasn’t you turning him over dozens of times last year so he didn’t drown in his own vomit, it wasn’t you covering him up during the snow storms and having to leave him outside, only because he was not allowed into our shelter anymore due to his behavior. You should have cared before you had a target to turn your anger against. I see officers every single day bust their asses for people, I have also seen them bust people’s asses when needed. Real world, that’s what you need to experience, real world.
It’s been a BIT more than ONE SPD/KC cop, let’s be fair/honest.
Cobane.
Birk.
Schene.
M. Woolum (TWICE!!)
Garth Haynes.
Malaika Brooks’ attacker (who tasered her pregnant body three times).
Offcer Oshikawa-Clay
Yvette Gaston’s (a probation officer, herself) awful attackers.
Nebinger’s assailants (both KCS and SPD paid out the nose for that lawsuit)
Offcers Dunn & Davenport.
The Metro Tunnel ‘cops’.
Officer James Lee (two counts).
Ian Walsh
Daniel Saunders’ THREE brutality cops.
Don Waters.
Demetrius James’ attacker.
Joey Wilson’s attackers.
and please don’t forget Christopher Harris’s KC cop attacker that left this innocent man unable to walk or talk: TEN MILLION DOLLARS and ONE LIFE wasted because of police violence. http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/01/christoph
..not to mention Humphreys and Burton down in portland, and Foxworth Jr. and Tacoma’s Martin & Kolp. See also: Abbe Dorn.
Lord has this horse been beaten. This story is so over. Let the anger go. In general those that sign up to serve and put their lives on the line are very good and honest people. To generalize and make up lists of infractions proves that you may just have too much time on your hands, and far too much anger. Please go cause trouble somewhere else, you have gotten just about all the juice out of this lemon that you are going to get…
who do these people think they are?
storming into my neighborhood, disturbing my businesses, breaking my windows, wasting my time, blocking my streets, scaring my children, my friends, my family and requiring the mobilization of 30-50 police in riot gear and attendant resources (think dollars) is going to get you nothing but a facefull of mace and a police record.
You want to honor people who have been wrongly injured or killed by increasing tension and encouraging or engaging in violence? Spend your time pressuring local, state and federal officials who can do something about it. get involved in elections. make a difference, not a mess. and stay out of my neighborhood if you dont belong here.
Solution: Take all the violent cops that can’t control themselves and let them wail on these jackoffs. Put it on pay-per-view and use the proceeds to cover any city budget shortfalls.
Stanford Prison Experiment
Smitty,
You misinformation of police brutality “suspects” and victims astounds me. Ian walsh was being assaulted and did want any citizen has a legal right to do to defend themselves. Yvette gaston shoved an officer not once but twice and wasn’t even arrested or touched by police other than to push her back. The metro tunnel ‘cops’ what kind of a reference is that.
Let’s take all the contacts and add them up for the same year the incident happened. You would have close to 5 million contacts I’m sure. Let’s add king county’s contacts to that since it is convenient for your argument and you could have far more. 18 cited incidents out of 5 million contacts to be modest with my dummy math.
i understand the contempt for cops, but do they need to vandalize private property? what does that prove?
how many mistakes need to happen before you realize there is a problem? 10? 100?
Depends on what percent of the total those mistakes are…
“Hello” :
My point was to refute SeattleSlew’s hyperbole/BS: Is it more than one person among local LE that are the problem or not? It’s sure-the-fuck not ONE. It’s arguably an entire ‘culture’ in the local LE industry. You’ve read former chief Stamper’s book, right?
Walsh was ‘legal’, sure, but was still a case of violence by a cop. I notice no mention of Schene, Lee, Woolum or Cobane…
“5 million contacts” in a city of under 600,000 seems like an interesting stat: go ahead and cite a legit reference, please.
A stat much more to the point: in 2 years between 2008 and 2010 the SPD alone has gotten its sorry ass into 12 wrongdoing/brutality lawsuits.
That’s 12 out of 1,330 city officers that had/have cases a. witnessed/with a judge-approved level of evidence b. serious enough to go to court c. racking up millions of taxdollars wasted and officer/SPD mgmt time d. trashing the social contract of trust between LE and non-LE citizens.
If it were truly just one, I’d say “let it go, one is a mistake”,
but 12 court-worthy cases?
12 court-worthy cases and at least another 5-10 newsworthy violence cases in the same time period? (Not even counting the non-violent procedural mistakes …that sometimes let legit criminals go free on technicalities)
12 = That’s a ghastly trend & a public employee problem to be solved.
to slew: If 12 SSD teachers were caught sexually abusing kids, heads would roll and you know it.
Even more worthwhile on that ‘environment and/or situation can change you via internalization’ subject is the book “The Lucifer Effect: understanding how good people turn evil”
For International F the Police Day, that was a fairly lame turn out.
The saving grace is the photo of the “anarchist” in name brand jeans and shoes and a North Face backpack. Comical!
as smitty implies, it is certainly more than a bad apple, it is rather like an antire genus of poison fruit, and this demo was not about any isolated incident. It was about opposing all police because they are police.
@ddean – the demo, while organized by anarchists, was not populated soley by anarchists (or maybe it was – you’d have to ask each individual who was there, good luck with that). There is no reason to assume that that person is an anarchist, nor is there any reason to assume anarchists don’t always wear all black.
Here’s a clue for everyone who thinks it’s so hilarious that anarchists wear the same clothes as everyone else or whatever:
1. Even if you oppose and are fighting to dismantle capitalism, you need shoes and backpacks and whatever else to fight with. Yes, it’s impossible to have values and not be perceived as a hypocrite at times. Believing that some consumer purity “vote with your dollars” bullshit would make us any better off is a liberal idea, not an anarchist one.
2. We steal.
I support the seattle pd. they are the nicest and most polite cops ive ever dealt with, and ive been arrested. Im from the south [miami] and im scared of the cops there. they beat the crap out of me for virtually nothing. the cops in NYC are way scarier. if the SPD was really brutal these people would not be protesting. they would be afraid. the SPD does not comit brutality as a policy. one cop made a mistake. these guys dont get paid $hit and take great risks. I live in capitol hill/downtown and its turning into a cesspool of street punks and vagrants. Im sick of watching people deal and do heroin and speed in my backyard. if the cops took some of these a$$holes and beat the cr@p out of them like they do in other places in this country this would be a better city. this city needs to wake up and realize you have big city problems which cannot be dealt with by liberal attitudes. I hope the spd deals with these people rioting in my niegboorhood with the utmost maximum force allowed by law and if they go a little farther I wont complain. otherwise this town will drown in crime. the crime is skyrocketing in seattle -but you wont read that in a paper or blog. seattle needs more police brutality